SOCCER:SAM ALLARDYCE looked up at the giant picture of himself on the scoreboard at Ewood Park, prepared to pose with a Blackburn shirt, and smiled. The rain had momentarily ceased and Allardyce, who was due to be in Dubai this week, hoped it was a sign.

"If I'm that lucky on Saturday," he said, "we'll be all right." Perhaps Lynne Allardyce would have been happier if her husband had been preparing for Christmas on the shores of the Arabian Sea rather than dealing with Stoke City tomorrow. During the summer, she had persuaded Sam to withdraw his application to manage Blackburn, both of them feeling that after the traumas of his sacking by Newcastle in January he had not had a long enough break. In his 16 years in management they had never had Christmas off. This was supposed to be the exception.

"I will make it up to her by coming home with a smile on my face on Saturday because we have won," said Allardyce after signing a three-year contract as Blackburn manager. "In a way your better half feels the pressures a lot more than you do. We had a discussion about leaving it until the New Year and then start actively looking for a job but, for me, the time was right and here I am."

"Here" means doing what he has done since he found himself as player-manager of Limerick pounding the streets with a local priest looking for a businessman prepared to pay his players' wages - attempting to make a club with limited means perform beyond itself. At Bolton, Allardyce made it into an art form. But as David Moyes and Mark Hughes have discovered, that kind of success is a draining, wearing experience - not least because every August you have to repeat it.

"Actually, the most mentally-draining thing a manager can do is living in the bottom three in the Premier League for a long period of time," Allardyce said, stating his belief that for the first time since 2003 a club will need 40 points or more to survive. "People say that we need two wins to get out of it but that assumes the teams above you all lose. It will take a long time, perhaps six games, to catch up with the rest. But apart from David Bentley and Brad Friedel, there is no difference to the squad that finished seventh last year. This team is capable of finishing in a mid-table position in my opinion. We need a lot of hard work and a win for confidence to grow."

Blackburn admit to having little money for the January transfer window, although Allardyce is adamant the sale of Roque Santa Cruz to Manchester City is not the foregone conclusion. "I don't know why a club trying to survive would want to sell its best striker," he said bluntly. "And then you would have to replace him. There is always an inflated market in January because most of the time you need to find a player with Premier League experience. If he is from abroad and you have 17 games to go, it could take him 10 just to settle."

Of Paul Ince's coaches, Archie Knox and Ray Mathias have been dismissed but Karl Robinson has been retained and Allardyce has recruited Neil McDonald from Leeds as his assistant. He expects one more addition.

According to his stated intentions, the big problem for Blackburn is that Allardyce is a year away from retirement. "Yes, I did say I would finish at 55 but that was 10 years ago," he said. "It's gone so quickly and I've had so much success I want another great journey. Hopefully, this is it."